Sunday, September 8, 2013

Google Fail & Vitamin Poem

So we're all familiar with this internal dialogue/scenario:

"Hmmm, you know what would be great in this lesson? ____________! Let's Google that..."
6 seconds pass...
"There we go! Modify this a wee bit, combine with that... boom! I'm done! Now for Boardwalk Empire!"

And we're also familiar with this one:

"Hmmm, you know what would be great in this lesson? ____________! Let's Google that..."
16 minutes pass...
"What the heck??!! I CANNOT be the first person who has thought of this! What is the deal with these scurvy pirate teacher hoarders??!! Don't people know how to share??!! Dagnabbit!"

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Yeah, so I fell prey to Scenario #2 tonight, and I had to {gasp!} create my own wheel.

All non-teachers are now completely lost. Too bad.

In Foods 1 I'm working my way through a very basic introduction to the major nutrients. First, I will digress and discuss my Foods curriculum philosophy. I do not cook first quarter. For one, IT'S TOO DARN HOT! No air conditioning does not lend itself to a pleasant lab experience. Two, I find that it's absolutely crucial to spend a substantial chunk of time right out of the gate on nutrition; once we start in the kitchens the only thing the kids care about is "When're we gonna cook again? What're we gonna cook? Why do we have to learn this? This is stupid, why aren't we cooking?" and so on and so forth. So I start out with a big nutrition push, then go deeper as we cook our way through the different units.

And I begin with a basic overview of the six major nutrients, and drill them until they've got the real basic info and then we can begin to have intelligent discussions and really dig into the issues.

All this to say that this afternoon I was revamping the notes we take on vitamins, and I thought I'd really like them to be able to recall what each vitamin does, which is actually quite a bit of information and I don't want to spend days upon days just on vitamins. So, I'd need to boil it down to just the key information and give them some tricks to help them memorize them. At which point I thought, "There must be some kind of little poem or song out there about the vitamins!" Wrong. Could not find anything. Well, anything at all useful. Some weird stuff and some incomplete stuff, nothing helpful.

So I wrote my own. And since I am not a scurvy pirate teacher hoarder, I am going to share. Let me forewarn you that this is no work of genius; also, you really have to want it to make some of the syncopation work. Here it is:


And as I am big on both skeleton notes and graphic organizers, here is the form of the poem that my students will actually receive:

 And here's the filled in version:
We'll see how it works out!

And in case you're wondering, once we get into the more complicated stuff, I make them come up with their own stupid poems and memory devices, but first you gotta model, model, model.

Happy Sunday night!



3 comments:

  1. Absolutely love it! I find that one if the most challenging parts if being an FCS teaching is that I find I'm constantly creating materials because I can't find any really great stuff out there (especially because I teach in a state where most schools dint have fcs). You're stuff is great- I'm so glad you share!

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  2. Wow! Thank you! This is just what I needed!

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